Barriers to implementation: do municipal civil servants have sufficient knowledge on effective road measures?

Two questionnaires were distributed among municipal civil servants of Dutch municipalities to investigate their knowledge of the effectiveness of road safety measures and how they assess this effectiveness. The results show a lack of knowledge, especially of the effectiveness of traffic education and publicity campaigns. Moreover, the effectiveness of measures for which municipal civil servants often use informal sources is in most cases incorrectly assessed. Habits (‘I just think so’) appear to largely contribute to the assessment of the effectiveness of traffic education and publicity campaigns. For dissemination strategies, municipal civil servants prefer a range of options. Remarkably, these were not the knowledge sources they indicated as their knowledge sources in the survey. An effective dissemination strategy to broaden the knowledge of municipal civil servants on the effectiveness of road safety measures might therefore be difficult to formulate.